By the time she reached Hispaniola she was a killer.
The first hurricane of the 1987 season turned out to be the most deadly in decades, ravaging the Caribbean, littering the beaches of Haiti with fishing boats and bodies. Then she sped through the Florida Straits, turned north and slammed into the southwest coast of Florida. Finally, Alina died, drifting away as a depression somewhere over Chesapeake Bay.
And now the shell seekers were out, celebrating her wake.
Louis watched them as they walked the beach. Every so often, someone would stoop, pick up a prize, and hold it up to the white morning sun before dropping it in a net bag. But mostly they walked, heads bowed, shoulders stooped, criss-crossing silently across the sand to the dirge-like drone of the waves.
The beach was a mess. The dunes had been eaten away almost up to his cottage, the sea oats beaten down, the sea grape trees snapped and stripped. About a hundred yards to the south, a sailboat lay heeled over in the sand, its mast bent like a straw, the halyards looped and tangled.
Louis looked back at his cottage. It was still standing, though last night he was sure it wasn’t going to survive. Around midnight, the guy on the radio was trying to sound cool as he reported the wind was up to 110 miles an hour and that Alina was coming up out of the Florida Straits on a north-northeast course aiming right at Sanibel-Captiva. The cottage’s roof was leaking, the old boards groaning. Finally, Louis put Issy in the cat carrier and ran down the street in the pelting rain to take cover in Timmy’s Nook. He had sat out the storm in the restaurant drinking warm Heinekens in the dark with Bev and Carlo, listening to the bam! pop! fizz! of electrical transmitters blowing, watching the night sky turn acid green.
His first hurricane.
Bev, who had lived in Florida all her sixty-some years, called it a “pissy little blow job, nothing like Donna back in sixty.” He didn’t tell her it had scared the living shit out of him.
But he had survived. And now...
God, had the sky ever been bluer? Like it had been stripped clean and repainted. He drew in a deep breath of sea spray, looking again at the shell seekers. They always came after a big storm, Bev had told him, a horde descending on the beach to comb through the debris kicked up from the sea.
He wondered if anyone had died in the storm. The electric and phones were still out, so there was no way to tell yet. And the two-lane road that ran the length of Sanibel-Captiva was covered in sand and downed trees.
He glanced at his watch. Eight A.M. He had been awake all night, but he wasn’t tired. There was still a charge in the air, the kind that came when something bad missed you and kept going, a bullet, a botched love affair, a speeding car.
His stomach rumbled. There was nothing to eat in the cottage and Bev had told him not to open his fridge because who knew how long the power would be out?
He decided to walk up the beach and see if anything was open.
Fish carcasses. Driftwood. Great green ropes of kelp.
Beer bottles, a broken lawn chair, rusted cans, a car tire.
A dead seagull. Milky-eyed fish. Blue-bubbled Portuguese man-of-war.
Chunks of Styrofoam, plastic flowers, a broken flip-flop.
Millions of shells. A mosaic of pink, yellow, purple, blue. All sizes and shapes. Geometric swirls, regal conchs, butterfly-winged coquinas. He had never seen so many different shells.
Louis stopped abruptly, his eyes on the wet sand.
It was big, much bigger than the other shells. That was what had made him stop. That and the color —- a mottled rust that didn’t quite look like any other shell.
He knelt and brushed away the seaweed. He drew back sharply.
It was a skull. Small, very small, maybe the size of a softball. And human. He could see that now as he carefully lifted away the last of the seaweed.
It was wedged sideways, half buried in the sand. The waves crept up, sending a gentle stream of sea foam into the nasal cavity and out again.
Louis sat back on his legs, staring at the skull. He quickly scanned the surrounding debris but saw no other bones, no clothing, no evidence of a body. Just this tiny skull.
He squinted out at the gulf water, still churning green from the storm. Damn, where had it come from? A boat? A drowning?
Voices...a couple was approaching, heads down, the man sweeping a metal detector across the sand. The beach was already crowded and more people were coming. He was too far away from his cottage and couldn’t call the cops anyway.
He looked back at the skull, then out over the gulf. He couldn’t leave the skull here for someone else to find. There was no choice. He quickly pulled off his T-shirt and spread it on the sand. Picking up a stick, he wedged it carefully in the eye socket. He extracted the skull from the sand and placed it on the shirt. Wrapping it up, he stood and hurried back to the cottage.